How MOVUS is helping dumb machines join the IoT era

The world is full of dumb machines, and Brad Parsons wants to
drag them whirring, gurgling and buzzing into the Internet of Things era.

Parsons is the founder and
CEO of Brisbane company MOVUS, which sells a pay-as-you-go service that
he describes as being somewhat akin to a Fitbit for machines: A device that can
be easily attached to a piece of non-instrumented industrial equipment and with
the aid of some AI smarts give its owner an indication of when things are
starting to go south.

Before founding MOVUS,
Parsons worked in a range of heavy asset industries such as mining and freight
rail. His focus was on strategic projects that blended the worlds of IT and OT,
such as mine-site automation and condition monitoring programs.

Parsons found that although
a lot of big, heavy industrial assets are instrumented, there’s a large layer
of assets — so-called B-class assets — that aren’t.

“It’s the motors and the
pumps and the fans – all the stuff that really drives industry but doesn’t get
the attention of the big machines,” Parsons told Computerworld.
“Everyone wants to see a driverless haul truck with 400 tonnes of dirt in the
back,” the CEO said. But people are less excited about a sewage pump, until
they're knee-deep trying to fix a failed one.

“There’s hundreds and
hundreds of millions of those types of assets. There are about 2.3 billion
electric motors on the planet; when you look at the number of humans, it’s
about three humans per machine,” Parsons said.

Of those machines, only
around 3 per cent are instrumented. The CEO said the key challenge that MOVUS
set out to solve is how to instrument the other 97 per cent, allowing their
operators to prevent breakdowns or send an employee hundreds of kilometres to
service an asset only to have to return a month later.

MOVUS’s answer is a device
dubbed the FitMachine, which has a magnet that allows it to be attached to
equipment, and some 17,000 lines of on-board code help it monitor vibration,
noise and temperature.

Parsons said instead of
businesses needing to purchase a sensor, analytics platform, and a gateway and
then connect them all together, MOVUS bundles it all together in a single
platform centred on the data derived from the FitMachine.

An iOS or Android mobile
app is used to register a FitMachine on MOVUS’s platform, which runs on Amazon
Web Services. The FitMachine can transmit data either over Wi-Fi if it’s
available or a MOVUS-built rugged gateway device designed to survive harsh
industrial environments.

In addition to standard
cellular connections, the current version of the gateway can leverage Telstra’s Cat M1 network, which is designed for IoT
applications (Telstra is one of MOVUS’s investors). Cat M1 can “get into
deeper, darker holes” than standard LTE connections, Parsons said.

At the heart of the
platform is an AI engine that takes in a continuous stream of data from a
registered sensor.

“Once [a sensor is
registered], it’s literally a week to two weeks before it’s built a baseline of
what’s normal for the machine,” Parsons said. “That normal – what the machine
is listening to – is the vibrations, the temperature, and the noise of the
machine.”

Once that baseline is
established for a particular FitMachine, the AI engine can then issue an alert
if a significant anomaly is detected.

“It gives you peace and
mind that the thing’s working,” Parsons said.

That means instead of
sending out a human once a month, or a quarter, or a year, to spend five to 10
minutes checking that a machine is operating normally, and running the risk of
a failure occurring in between checkups, someone can be dispatched when there
are signs of impending failure.

MOVUS provides customers
with a web-based dashboard that can be accessed from a mobile device or PC.
However, its platform is also API-enabled to allow larger businesses to
integrate the system into their enterprise applications.

For example a business can
link it to an asset management system or feed it into a workforce management
system to automatically trigger a maintenance process when necessary, Parsons
said.

Because the system is
simple (even if the underlying technology isn't), MOVUS’s platform has
applicability to “such a diversity” of industries, the CEO said.

“Every week we get a new
use case,” he added. Rather than focusing on a particular industry, MOVUS is
“focusing on the machines”. It has customers from two dozen or so different industries
across Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific, and has had sales
enquiries from around the world — even as far as Iceland.

“It doesn’t really matter
where they are on the planet because if they’ve got a Wi-Fi connection then
they can just connect the sensors to that and that’s the beauty of the system,”
Parsons said.

MOVUS was founded in 2015
and at the start of 2016 launched what Parsons describes as an MVP. The startup
spent 2016 honing the FitMachine ahead of its first commercial sale in January
2017.

Development of the device
and the software platform is ongoing. The current version is designed for fixed
equipment such as fans, motors and pumps, but it makes sense to build a version
that can be fitted to mobile assets such as tractors, excavators and
bulldozers, Parsons said.

The sixth generation
FitMachine is currently in the field, with the seventh expected to launch soon
and generation eight currently being designed.

Much of the development has
focused on incorporating more sophisticated sensors into the device as well as
improving battery life (currently a FitMachine’s battery can last for a couple
of years, but some customers are seeking even longer-lived devices).

Copyright 2019 IDG Communications. ABN 14 001 592 650. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of IDG Communications is prohibited.